Performance Analysis of TDOA and FDOA Estimation for Pulse Signals

Time difference of arrival (TDOA) and frequency difference of arrival (FDOA) are effective measurements for localizing emitters’ radiating pulse signals, such as radar. Temporal sparsity of pulse signals makes their TDOA and FDOA estimation precisions much different from that of continuous communication and acoustic signals. The way how the precisions are affected by various parameters, e.g., temporal duration of signals, may also deviate significantly in scenarios of pulse signals from that of continuous ones. In this paper, theoretical analyses are carried out to reveal the Cramer–Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) of TDOA and FDOA estimation precisions of pulse signals and also to obtain insights on how the CRLBs are affected by various parameters, including pulse number, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), pulse width, and pulse repetition interval (PRI). Simulation results verify the correctness of the derived CRLBs and their variations with different parameters.